Hello Alan,
No, you cannot include custom fields in emails. This is something we are unlikely to implement. We had already tried that with Akeeba Subscriptions and we found out that the expectations of our clients could not be met with maintainable code. For example, when you have a multiple selection list should you see a list of the values or the labels of the checked boxes? Should they be presented as a comma separated list, an unordered list, an ordered list, or something entirely different? It became too fuzzy, too fast. So we decided to not implement such a feature in ATS at all.
Regarding guest tickets we also decided against this feature, primarily for security and usability reasons. For starters, it is extremely easy to forge an email address. An enterprising spammer would be able to automatically submit your support form thousands of times, sending his spam message as a ticket confirmation sent by your site. This would cause your email address to be marked as a spammer and most likely get your host to kick you out because you blacklisted one of their IP addresses as a spam network.
Moreover, many people tend to have multiple email addresses on the same mail client and/or use "in behalf of" addresses. We've seen that in numerous occasions when (manually) replying to users with pre-sales / account support questions sent through our Contact Us page. If these people used email address A to submit a ticket and replied using email address B you'd have two tickets that are impossible to correlate.
Also note that this could be a security hole. All tickets need to be owned by a user ID, otherwise anyone could reply to any ticket (MAJOR security issue). This means that the "guest" tickets would in fact create a Joomla! user account which would have to be automatically activated, without the user going through the regular user registration process. That's a spammer's nirvana.
For these reasons (and many more which I won't analyse here) I have decided against guest tickets. That's a feature we are not going to implement.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
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